Dream Job | Kevin & Morgan Tyschper

If you stop by DeEtta’s Bakery, you’ll likely meet co-founders Kevin and Morgan Tyschper as you peruse the cookies, cupcakes, pastries, award-winning doughnuts and distinctive wedding cakes. Kevin spent twenty years in the corporate world—including a stint at Pillsbury—and has two graduate degrees, but it’s more than just his business background that has helped establish DeEtta’s as Naperville’s hometown bakery.

How did you get started?

We had been doing this on the side for a few years, with a small baking business out of a friend’s commercial kitchen. It was all word-of-mouth. We had a website, and the business grew and grew, encompassing everything we do. We had to make a decision: Do we do this full-time or just stop? When the company I was working for said, “We’re moving to Texas, come with us,” it wasn’t really the right move for us. So we said, “OK, here’s our dream, it’s going to be accelerated now.”

One of our tenets when we opened was to be really involved in the community. We’re not just a business—we live in the community, work in the community and our kids go to school in the community. We really want to be part of it. It’s not that we have to, we want to.

Why is this a dream job for you?

You can have skill, and you can have passion. You can’t teach passion. This was a passion both my wife—who is a pediatric dietician—and I had. This is what we love to do. We never wanted to be in a position twenty years from now to look back and think we could’ve…should’ve… would’ve. This was our opportunity. Getting into this business takes a tremendous amount of hard work with very long hours, and it’s risky if you don’t do it right. We wanted to do it right, develop the best practice we could, really understand our customer base and be involved in the community, which has made the business a success.

What makes DeEtta’s special?

The products are great. But it’s not just the products, it’s the customer service piece of it, the relationships we’ve built with customers. It’s funny—over almost the nine years we’ve been in existence we’ve worked on couples’ engagement party, bridal shower, wedding, first birthday and baptism. It’s a neat concept; we’ve kind of just grown with families. We work with a lot of corporate wholesale clients, too. We deliver a service to them that’s not just what they expect, but better than they expect.

What was it like to win the judge’s choice award for your chocolate sour cream old fashioned at Donut Fest Chicago?

It’s fantastic for us. It is some validation for all the hard work we’re doing. We were honored enough just to be involved with those different doughnut shops in the city. To really win it all, wow! Did we expect it? No. Do we think our doughnuts are fantastic? Yes! After we won, an organizer said, “Nobody wins the first year.”

Talk about the new café opening this spring at Hotel Indigo in downtown Naperville’s Water Street District.

We’re partnering with Sparrow Coffee Roastery, which is a fantastic roaster in the West Loop. They serve two-thirds of the Michelin-star restaurants in the city of Chicago. They’re really focused on the craft of coffee. We’re doing the pastry program and they will be doing the coffee program. It’ll be something Naperville has never seen.